A Girl's Best Friend
“A kiss on the hand
May be quite continental
But diamonds are a girl's best friend.”
Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
Written by: L. Robin / J. Styne, Performed by Marylin Monroe, Official Sound Track, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Once we kicked the so-called “Warlord of Memphis” and his followers out of Memphis (mostly by killing them), things settled into something of a routine. If you didn’t have particularly good skills, like me, you got put in a service unit that rotated duties. A week of lookout duty or patrol support, a week of salvage support, a week of farming, then a week of general support, which meant fun things like helping with cooking, collecting garbage, etc.
At morning formation, before she started parceling out assignments, the Duty Sergeant asked if anyone had grown up or lived in southwestern Arkansas, especially around the town of Murfreesboro, Arkansas. I don’t like to volunteer anything, but it so happened that my mom had been the principal at Murfreesboro High School my entire life, prewar, so after a few moments, my hand went up. I got told to fall out and stand by.
After formation, the Duty Sergeant quizzed me about where I grew up. Then she wrote me a pass and a travel voucher and told me to catch the next bus to HQ. When the morning bus pulled up, I got on, showed the driver my paperwork, and took a seat. The orderly at HQ sent me to a briefing room and gave me a lunch chit. There were a couple of other soldiers there, but no one I knew right off. As the morning dragged on, a few more people showed up. Finally, just before lunch, a group of officers came in, led by an honest-to-god General. As we jumped to attention, she just waved us back down.
“At ease, we might as well get to know each other. LT, put the big map up.”
A VERY young Lieutenant pulled a map out of a case, and quickly hung it up. It showed the southern half of Arkansas. “We have control over I-40, through Little Rock, all the way to Texas and beyond. Anti-government forces, aligned with a racist group, have control of most of the Northern third of Arkansas.”
We have intelligence that this group is now pushing south, especially in the western parts of Arkansas. We have also learned that the hydroelectric dam at Narrows Dam is still working. The kicker is, the old tourist attraction at the Crater of Diamonds has some all-electric earth-moving equipment, and they just unearthed a seam of industrial diamonds – all above one-caret.”
“We can’t let these racist assholes have control of this resource.”
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